 Dear colleagues,
I hope your new year has gotten off to a great start! Here
at the Center for the Improvement of Student Learning (CISL) we have been
thinking a lot about the conditions that enable the school and the community to
wrap around students to ensure their success. In the Washington Integrated Student Supports
Protocol we refer to this as the enabling
context for integrated student supports.
The enabling context includes both the cultural elements like norms, values, and expectations, along with structural elements like funding,
professional learning, and communication protocols that enable adults who
engage with students in different spaces (home, school, and the community) to
come together to support students’ success. We have tried to visualize these
relationships here.
In this framework, leadership, both formal and informal,
drives the changes in the school and community required to implement an
integrated approach. Leadership helps to shape the way we think about culture, and leadership helps put the structures in
place to do the work.
As we continue to work toward our goal of closing
educational opportunity gaps, we think that these elements need to be in place
in order to create a sustainable system that ensures every student has equitable
access to the supports they need to be successful.
We know that both collaboration and leading large-scale
systemic change is hard, so it is important that we #GoTogether.
| 
